Weekend Roundup

• The Wall Street Journal interviewed Laura Phillips Sawyer (University of Georgia School of Law) for this piece on the Justice Department's pursuit of Google over its allegedly anti-competitive conduct. 

• Anders Walker reviews Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (2020) on Jotwell. 
  

• Ellen DuBois speaks on her book on Suffrage: Women's Long Battle for the Vote in the Washington History Seminar on Monday, October 26 at 4:00 pm ET.  Register for the webinar here or watch on live our Facebook Page.
  

• Ronit Stahl, Berkeley, delivers Lessons from RBG: Jews & Religious Freedom in the United States (The Paul & Dorothy Grob Memorial Lecture at the University of Virginia) on Thursday, October 29, from 7-8PM EST. 

• Nurfadzilah Yahaya, National University of Singapore, did online events recently at NUS, the University of Hong Kong, and elsewhere on her book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia. Here's a recorded one hosted by the HLS Program in Islamic Law last month.
  

• Just published: Holmes Reads Holmes: Reflections on the Real-Life Links Between the Jurist and the Detective, ed. Ross E. Davies and M. H. Hoeflich (Lawbook Exchange, 2020).
  

• ICYMI: Alexander Zhang, a J.D./Ph.D. student in law and history at Yale, on "The Forgotten Third Amendment [that] Could Give Pandemic-Struck America a Way Forward" (The Atlantic).  50 historic moments in the U.S. Supreme Court (Stacker via the Buffalo News).  Jerold Auerbach recalls--not happily--his Development of Legal Institutions class at Columbia Law School.  For more on Julius Goebel, this.
  

• Update: ConSource digital library to the Quill Project in Oxford (Real Clear Education).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

CFP: Asian Legal History

 [We have the following announcement and CFP.  DRE]

 The Transnational Legal History Group of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law (CCTL) and the University of Law - Hue University will be jointly organizing a conference on the theme of Asian Legal History at the University of Law - Hue University, Hue, Vietnam, on 24-25 July 2021. Convened by Bui Ngoc Son and Christopher Roberts, Assistant Professors at CUHK LAW, the conference aims to bring together a diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars, researchers, and graduate students to share their research findings on topics relating to legal history in Asia.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Andrew Harding, Visiting Research Professor, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law
Pip Nicholson, Dean, William Hearn Professor of Law, Melbourne Law School
Radhika Singha, Professor of Modern Indian History, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Lutz-Christian Wolff, Dean, Wei Lun Professor of Law, CUHK LAW

Call for Papers:

The organizers invite proposals for individual papers and panels. Submissions on any subject, providing it pertains to legal history in Asia, will be considered. General topics may include:

The historical evolution of common law, civil law, and socialist law traditions in Asia;
Legal pluralism and jurisdictional clashes;
Dynastic law;
Colonial law;
Customary law and village law;
Buddhist Law, Confucian Law, Hindu Law, and Islamic Law;
The history of a particular area of law (constitutional law, property law, criminal law, etc);
Theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying Asian legal history.

The conference organizers are particularly interested in papers addressing the following subjects:

Asian approaches to and impacts upon the historical development of international law;
Transnational legal history;
The relationship between metropolitan and colonial approaches to law;
The history of law, gender and sexuality;
The evolution of, and contestations around, legal positivism;
The history of law schools and of the formation of the judiciary and of members of the legal profession;
The history of public order law;
The history of law and violence.

Individual paper proposals should include a 300-word abstract and the author’s contact information.  Panel proposals should include a 300-word description of the panel, 300-word abstracts of three to four individual papers, contact information for each person on the panel, and contact information for the chairs of the panel.

Registration Fee: HK$ 200 per participant.  Conference organizers will provide two lunches, one dinner, and refreshments. Participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation costs.

Important dates:

5 October 2020: Online abstract submission opens
15 December 2020: Abstract submission deadline
15 February 2021: Notification of acceptance
15 March 2021: Registration opens
30 April 2021: Early registration and payment closes
25 June 2021: Regular registration and payment closes
24-25 July 2021: The conference takes place

Please submit the abstracts via online form by 15 December 2020. For enquiries, please contact the CCTL at cctl.law@cuhk.edu.hk.

Zhu on China Suzerainty over Tibet and Mongolia

Yuan Yi Zhu, Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at Pembroke College, Oxford, has published Suzerainty, Semi-Sovereignty, and International Legal Hierarchies on China's Borderlands, in the Asian Journal of International Law:

The concept of semi-sovereignty, a now obsolete category of international entities possessing limited sovereignty, remains hazily understood. However, the historical examination of how semi-sovereignty was defined and practised during the long nineteenth century can provide insights on the interplay between authority and control within the hierarchies of international relations. This paper examines one specific type of semi-sovereignty—namely, suzerainty—which is often used to describe China's traditional authority in Tibet and Mongolia. By examining the events that led to the acceptance of suzerainty as the legal framing for the China-Tibet and China-Mongolia relationships, I argue that suzerainty was a deliberately vague concept that could be used to create liminal international legal spaces to the advantage of Western states, and to mediate between competing claims of political authority. Finally, I point to the importance of semi-sovereignty as an arena of legal contestation between the Western and non-Western members of the “Family of Nations”.

Update: With the new link above, the article is ungated.

–Dan Ernst

Du on filiality and falsity in Qing China

Last year, Yue Du (Cornell University) published "Policies and Counterstrategies: State-Sponsored Filiality and False Accusation in Qing China" in the International Journal of Asian Studies 16 (2019), 79-97. Here's the abstract: 

Using court cases culled from various national and local archives in China, this article examines two strategies widely employed by Qing litigants to manipulate state-sponsored filiality to advance their perceived interests in court: “instrumental filicide to lodge a false accusation” and “false accusation of unfiliality.” While Qing subjects were willing and able to exploit the legalized inequality between parent and child for profit-seeking purposes, the Qing imperial state tolerated such maneuvering so as to co-opt local negotiations to reinforce orthodox notions of the parent–child hierarchy in its subjects’ everyday lives. Local actors, who appealed to the Qing legal promotion of parental dominance and filial obedience to empower themselves, were recruited into the Qing state's project of moral penetration and social control, with law functioning as a conduit and instrument that gave the design of “ruling the empire through the principle of filial piety” a concrete legal form in imperial governance.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Moorings

In the eastern end of the Indian Ocean, the hardening of racial boundaries from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards occurred under the aegis of a globalized imperial system. According to Dutch classification, every non-white person in the Netherlands Indies was part of a European empire. The vast majority of Indies population were of course Dutch subjects, but there were people relegated to the category of ‘Foreign Orientals.’ For example, Malays were often labeled ‘Britisch-Maleiers,’ even if in Dutch territory simply because the Malay peninsula, identified as place of origin for all Malays, had fallen under British influence in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, Chinese subjects who originated from Taiwan were recognized as Japanese because the territory was colonised by Japan in 1895. South Asian populations in the Dutch colony on the other hand were alternatingly labelled ‘Britisch-Indiers,’ ‘Klingaleezen’ and ‘Bengaleezen.’ Because Dutch colonial censuses were not diligently undertaken, we do not know the proportion of the South Asian population throughout the colonial period; the only systematic colonial census published in 1930 put the population at 1-3% depending on their location in the vast archipelago. Evidently, urban areas in Padang, Medan and Surabaya had enough South Asians for them to have their own quarters with their own community heads.
    Yet the much older category of ‘mooren’ predated these categories, appearing in both VOC (Dutch East India Company) records and Dutch colonial government records before 1850 especially. Who were these ‘mooren’ exactly? A clue is provided by the fact that the term ‘klingaleezen’ was sometimes substituted for ‘mooren.’ By using the term ‘mooren,’ Dutch authorities linked South Indian Muslims with other Muslims much further away in Spain (who once ruled them) a few centuries before. But this link excluded non-Muslims from Malabar and parts of southern India. The ‘Hindoe-Klingaleezen’ were a “neglected” people the Dutch should pay more attention to, a Dutch newspaper lamented in 1918, which suggest that on its own, the term only referred to Muslims. Also, why did “Bengaleezen,” a label that applied to all Indians from northern India regardless of origin, remain a distinct but undifferentiated category too? Although nearly all references to ‘mooren’ after 1800 refer only to the Indian subcontinent, the term emerged out of Dutch experience in Sri Lanka from 1640 to 1796 referring to Muslims of Tamil descent who were living in Dutch Ceylon who were of mixed ethnicity. “But more likely, if not certain, is that they are descended from the 'Mooren,' or so-called Klingaleezen of the Malabar coast,” the reporter of Sumatra Courant noted in September 1871. They came mainly for trade, another reporter wrote in De Locomotief in 1873. The term, in other words had many layers some of which were shed by the Dutch colonial government who took over from the defunct VOC in 1800. By subsequently connecting the ‘mooren’ classification with the subcontinent only, the Dutch government got round the awkwardness of taking over corporate VOC rule by dint of forgetting their association with Dutch Ceylon by implying that those earlier ‘mooren’ are an artefact of an era that had recently ended. 'Mooren' in Netherlands Indies on the other hand were supposedly from the subcontinent instead. The question remains as to how the klingaleezen identified themselves since their voices are rarely found in the archives but in September 1927, a group classified as klingaleezen wrote to the colonial government requested that they not be referred as such anymore since the term is humiliating. The term “kling” had evolved into a racial slur by then in parts of Southeast Asia.
    The category of ‘Britisch-Indiers’ was taken literally. In 1886, the British government in India requested that the Dutch government accept the appointment of a ‘British-Indian Protector’ from the Straits Settlement of Penang to oversee south Indian immigrants (referred to as klingaleezen) in Deli in northeast Sumatra, the site of many tobacco plantations. The south Indian coolies who traveled to work in these plantations were not only claimed by British as subjects but made to sail from southern India to British Penang first before looping back to Deli across the Straits of Malacca although their passage was paid by plantation owners in Sumatra. Dutch authorities were aghast that their authority did not suffice, but British capital buoyed the Dutch tobacco industry and the advantage of having an interpreter in the form of the Protector enticed them to accept the appointment. This arrangement aligned with their imperialistic view of governance.
    Slightly up north, Siam challenged this conception of a world organized according to empires in the late nineteenth century as an independent nation not colonized by Europeans who nonetheless increasingly determined its borders. Through copious inter-imperial correspondence between Bangkok, Singapore and Batavia, the Dutch took it upon themselves to police the presence of Chinese, Malays and South Asians in Siam. The obsession led to the proliferation of “reispas” (travel pass) and travel certificates issued by Dutch consulates, both of which functioned as some kind of proto passport and visa, instruments that first emerged in the colonial world as the late Adam McKeown pointed out in his vast oeuvre. 
    Generally, it was impossible for most people to move freely in the Asia-Pacific region. Ultimately, colonial classification was an inscription practice obsessed with legibility and smoothness although normative confusion between categories persisted by design. Everything was coded and was capable of being endlessly recoded. While much of mobility research is preoccupied with the association between origins and destinations, we know we can move while staying still because one mechanism for mobility is paradoxically dispossession.
 

--Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Lee to Lecture on Contagious Diseases and the Rule of Law in the British Empire

[We have the following announcement from the Transnational Legal History Group Seminar of the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  DRE]

‘Protecting Women and Morals? Contagious Diseases Laws and the “Rule of Law” Ideal in the British Empire, 1886-1899’ by Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee (Online)

What does it mean for liberal empires to invoke the rule of law, on the one hand, and to expand their
control over subject populations, on the other? This article examines debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases (CD) ordinances by the Protection of Women and Girls ordinances in the directly ruled colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca). Originating in Hong Kong, CD laws were used to contain the spread of venereal diseases among soldiers and other populations across the modern British empire. Officials employed these laws to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. While the compulsory medical examination of women ended with the repeal of CD laws across the British Empire, the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong continued to regulate prostitution for the protection of “native” women and their freedom, revealing the peculiar significance of the “rule of law” under liberal imperialism. In a historical ethnography of the “rule of law” ideal, Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee demonstrates how officials utilized its central premise of individual liberties as a comparative frame of evaluation to formulate a racially differentiated mode of gendered sovereignty.

Dr. Jack Jin Gary Lee’s research and teaching examines the significance of culture, law and politics in social processes of state-making and governance. He is working on a book on the significance of law and race in the making of “direct rule” in the modern British Empire. Focusing on the re-constitution of Jamaica and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang and Malacca) as Crown Colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century, this project examines the workings (and postcolonial legacies) of liberal imperialism in relation to colonies marked as plural societies. Notably, Lee’s dissertation on this topic won the University of California, San Diego’s 2018 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal (Social Sciences).

Register here by 5pm, 22 September 2020 to attend the seminar.

YaleNUS Job for Legal Historians et al.

[Here’s part of a job announcement of interest to legal historians.  Full announcement here.  DRE.]

Yale-NUS College is a highly selective liberal arts college in Singapore. Co-founded by YaleUniversity and the National University of Singapore, the College is committed to excellence in research and teaching in a full residential programme that integrates living and learning. Its curriculum educates students in Asian and Western intellectual traditions as well as current scientific thought. A student body of 1000 undergraduates from over 60 countries engages with 100 outstanding faculty from around the world through small classes and hands-on research. Students and faculty also have access to the wider resources of two world-leading research universities.

The College invites outstanding applications for at least one tenure-track position in the social sciences. Candidates would teach in the Double-degree Programme in Law and Liberal Arts.

Applicants should have a PhD in a relevant field, such as law and society, sociology, anthropology, politics, or history (a law degree is not expected) and demonstrate an outstanding track record for their career stage in the interdisciplinary study of law, such as (but not limited to) law and society, sociology of law, anthropology of law, law and courts, or legal history. In particular, we welcome applicants who can teach qualitative methods for interdisciplinary research on law and modules in Yale-NUS’s flagship common curriculum, such as Comparative Social Inquiry and Modern Social Thought.

[H/t: Donal Coffey and Joanna Grisinger.]